Here are 86 books that Experiencing War fans have personally recommended if you like
Experiencing War.
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As a cultural anthropologist, I'm like a cultural detective, exploring the intricate and often heart-wrenching world of war, conflict, and population displacement. But before you envision me in a dusty library, let me share that I found my passion for unraveling the everyday, lived experiences of war while living in Ukraine, where I became close to incredible individuals whose lives had been profoundly altered by war. When people shared with me how Russian aggression was tearing apart their cherished friendships and family bonds, I knew I had to delve into the profound effects of war on personal relationships. So, here I am, on a mission to illuminate the hidden stories, and the untold struggles, that are so important.
Katherine Verdery was on my PhD dissertation committee and her insights have long influenced my work.
This dry and ironically humorous book shows how corpses and statues do indeed have political “lives,” expanding readers’ awareness of who counts and what matters. The book gave me courage and inspiration to write a chapter about volunteer body collectors in Ukraine in my book. I explore how and why they cared about the human remains that the military had left behind.
In both books, care for the dead is life-affirming and helps establish new kinds of political order.
Since 1989, scores of bodies across Eastern Europe have been exhumed and brought to rest in new gravesites. Katherine Verdery investigates why certain corpses-the bodies of revolutionary leaders, heroes, artists, and other luminaries, as well as more humble folk-have taken on a political life in the turbulent times following the end of Communist Party rule, and what roles they play in revising the past and reorienting the present. Enlivening and invigorating the dialogue on postsocialist politics, this imaginative study helps us understand the dynamic and deeply symbolic nature of politics-and how it can breathe new life into old bones.
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I came to the U.S. in my early twenties to pursue a PhD, trading the familiar for the unknown. I am a scientist, an immigrant, and a daughter whose life was irrevocably fractured when my mother passed away in India while I was navigating the demands of graduate school. Grappling with grief, identity, and belonging in a foreign land shaped me to my core. The books on this list, centered on themes of family, loss, and the search for home, resonated with my experiences in profound ways. They offered me hope and a vital sense of connection, and I hope they speak to you just as powerfully.
How do you build a life on your own terms when you have been treated as less than human for years? Clemantine’s commitment and resilience to do exactly that made me fall in love with her book.
Clemantine’s story carried me from the unimaginable terror she endured as a six-year-old in Rwanda to the seemingly stable, even privileged life she carved out in the U.S. as a young adult.
Yet beneath that stability was a palpable restlessness, a search for who she truly was and where she belonged. I was right beside her as she grappled with her past, present, and a future she wished for.
I had to pause several times to reflect on my own questions about identity and belonging, but I couldn’t keep the book down.
A riveting story of dislocation, survival, and the power of stories to break or save us
When Clemantine Wamariya was six years old, her world was torn apart. She didn't know why her parents began talking in whispers, or why her neighbours started disappearing, or why she could hear distant thunder even when the skies were clear.
As the Rwandan civil war raged, Clemantine and her sister Claire were forced to flee their home. They ran for hours, then walked for days, not towards anything, just away. they sought refuge where they could find it, and escaped when refuge became…
As a cultural anthropologist, I'm like a cultural detective, exploring the intricate and often heart-wrenching world of war, conflict, and population displacement. But before you envision me in a dusty library, let me share that I found my passion for unraveling the everyday, lived experiences of war while living in Ukraine, where I became close to incredible individuals whose lives had been profoundly altered by war. When people shared with me how Russian aggression was tearing apart their cherished friendships and family bonds, I knew I had to delve into the profound effects of war on personal relationships. So, here I am, on a mission to illuminate the hidden stories, and the untold struggles, that are so important.
Taylor’s book about the civil war is unlike any other.
Utilizing personal letters and archival documents, the book illuminates the conflicting loyalties to kin and country in civil war America. Taylor takes readers beyond the battlefield to show them the emotional lives of people who had family members fighting on opposite sides of the war.
I found a direct parallel among the people I lived and worked among during my fieldwork in Ukraine. Instead of archival materials, I use personal interviews to show how the contemporary geopolitical crisis over Ukraine is accompanied by a relational crisis when siblings, friends, parents, and their children can no longer communicate.
This title discusses the crisis of the 'house divided'. The Civil War has long been described as a war pitting 'brother against brother'. The divided family is an enduring metaphor for the divided nation, but it also accurately reflects the reality of America's bloodiest war. Connecting the metaphor to the real experiences of families whose households were split by conflicting opinions about the war, Amy Murrell Taylor provides a social and cultural history of the divided family in Civil War America. She studies letters and diaries to understand how families coped with division between husbands and wives, brothers and sisters,…
The Year Mrs. Cooper Got Out More
by
Meredith Marple,
The coastal tourist town of Great Wharf, Maine, boasts a crime rate so low you might suspect someone’s lying.
Nevertheless, jobless empty nester Mallory Cooper has become increasingly reclusive and fearful. Careful to keep the red wine handy and loath to leave the house, Mallory misses her happier self—and so…
As a cultural anthropologist, I'm like a cultural detective, exploring the intricate and often heart-wrenching world of war, conflict, and population displacement. But before you envision me in a dusty library, let me share that I found my passion for unraveling the everyday, lived experiences of war while living in Ukraine, where I became close to incredible individuals whose lives had been profoundly altered by war. When people shared with me how Russian aggression was tearing apart their cherished friendships and family bonds, I knew I had to delve into the profound effects of war on personal relationships. So, here I am, on a mission to illuminate the hidden stories, and the untold struggles, that are so important.
If you have ever wondered what personal relationships have to do with war, read Genocide as a Social Practice by Daniel Feierstein.
This author explains the social mechanics of genocide by comparing various cases. He argues genocide doesn’t just destroy human bodies, it destroys relationships as a means to the ultimate goal of social reorganization. This is one of very few books I brought with me during my fieldwork in Ukraine, where it accompanied me on cross-country train travel.
As I argue in my book, and like genocide in other places, Ukrainian society is being reconfigured in part through loss and death, but also relationships.
Genocide not only annihilates people but also destroys and reorganizes social relations, using terror as a method. In Genocide as Social Practice, social scientist Daniel Feierstein looks at the policies of state-sponsored repression pursued by the Argentine military dictatorship against political opponents between 1976 and 1983 and those pursued by the Third Reich between 1933 and 1945. He finds similarities, not in the extent of the horror but in terms of the goals of the perpetrators.
The Nazis resorted to ruthless methods in part to stifle dissent but even more importantly to reorganize German society into a Volksgemeinschaft, or people's…
In the early 70s I was a pop singer/recording artist in Paris with a dinner show at a restaurant/discotheque/bar called Jacky’s Far West Saloon. Located in the trendy Montparnasse area, it was popular with the US embassy personnel. As such, it was also a magnet for spooks looking to score contacts with the Americans. I witnessed a lot of intrigue there, some of it major, most of it minor, and developed a passion for international espionage. I also developed a passion for international finance and went on to author or co-author ten books and over a hundred journal articles on the subject.
I like the Jack Ryan concept, a spy whose dad is the president. I like the campus one-for-all-all-for-one esprit de corps.
The starting point is nothing new – a diabolic plan to start a civil war. The Balkan venue is what makes it interesting. Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Turks, Chechens, Syrians, Russians, Bulgarians, Czechs, Muslim fanatics – what a mix! The reason this particular book is special is because I read it twice.
I have a Serbian colleague, which made the story more relevant to me, personally. We often discuss world events. The first time I read the book I did not know him. The second time I read it was after we had met and discussed extensively. I saw things in a different light and enjoyed it much more the second time.
A stunning thriller in the internationally bestselling series that inspired the smash-hit Amazon Prime TV Show JACK RYAN
Jack Ryan Jr is in an assassin's sights . . .
Sent to the Balkans on an analytical mission, Jack Ryan Jr visits Sarajevo to meet Aida, the girl his mother saved in the war. He finds a selfless, attractive woman helping refugees in a restless country where a new war is brewing.
Coming to her aid, Jack is soon tangling with the Serbian mafia while dodging assassins from the mysterious Iron Syndicate. Alone and defying recall orders, he believes this is…
Simo Laakkonen is director of Degree Program in Digital Culture, Landscape and Cultural Heritage, University of Turku, Finland. He is an environmental historian who has specialized among other things on the global environmental history of warfare during Industrial Age. He has coedited on this theme two special issues and three books, the latest one is The Resilient City in World War II: Urban Environmental Histories. He has selected five books that cover some main phases of the long environmental history of wars and mass violence.
How has nature influenced war and how have these changes presented? These kinds of basic questions make everyone interested in environmental history of war think.
This comprehensive book is easy to read but it provides valuable insights to the interaction between societies and nature from pre-colonial India to post-war Japan and serves as an excellent introduction to the field.
Contributors to this volume explore the dynamic between war and the physical environment from a variety of provocative viewpoints. The subjects of their essays range from conflicts in colonial India and South Africa to the U.S. Civil War and twentieth-century wars in Japan, Finland, and the Pacific Islands. Among the topics explored are: - the ways in which landscape can influence military strategies - why the decisive battle of the American Civil War was fought - the impact of war and peace on timber resources - the spread of pests and disease in wartime.
Don’t mess with the hothead—or he might just mess with you. Slater Ibáñez is only interested in two kinds of guys: the ones he wants to punch, and the ones he sleeps with. Things get interesting when they start to overlap. A freelance investigator, Slater trolls the dark side of…
My name is Jenny Harrison and my writing career started in 1997 in South Africa with Debbie's Story, which to my astonishment, became a bestseller. Thinking this was going to be an easy route to fame and fortune, I continued writing after migrating to New Zealand. Alas, the road to a bestseller is rife with disappointment but that didn't stop me from writing a bunch of paranormal and humorous novels. Circumstances led me to writing about families caught up in World War II. I don’t write about battles or generals, I write about ordinary people who face the unimagined cost of war and survive.
This book is by Alan Furst whose research is impeccable. His storytelling can be jerky and maybe chaotic but that’s how things were in the time he writes about. His characters are drawn from the sinister underbelly of war, the men and women who work in the shadows. His writing is intense, I remember the scenes as chaotic, with no character arc or happy ending, but a mirror of the times when life was lived moment by moment.
September 1939. As Warsaw falls to Hitler’s Wehrmacht, Captain Alexander de Milja is recruited by the intelligence service of the Polish underground. His mission: to transport the national gold reserve to safety, hidden on a refugee train to Bucharest. Then, in the back alleys and black-market bistros of Paris, in the tenements of Warsaw, with partizan guerrillas in the frozen forests of the Ukraine, and at Calais Harbor during an attack by British bombers, de Milja fights in the war of the shadows in a world without rules, a world of danger, treachery, and betrayal.
One might read for many reasons, but one of the main reasons for me is to connect and relate to the character. Female voices are very underheard, and I feel incredibly passionate about changing that and creating and reading stories where the female protagonists have strong voices and are not afraid to be heard. I think it’s important that we continue to create female characters that are raw and real and that portray subjects and feelings that need to be heard more.
I loved this book for so many reasons. The world-building is beautiful, the plot line is intriguing, and the main female character has a lot of depth to her. She’s beautiful and courageous, kind but strong, and she does anything for those she loves.
I saw much of myself in her character, which helped immerse me in the book as I read it. I’m a sucker for any book with a female protagonist that has a lot of depth; I feel it makes them more real, as we all have different sides to our personalities.
THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
'Epic, romantic, and enthralling from start to finish' Stephanie Garber
The stunning conclusion to the Celestial Kingdom Duology
After winning her mother's freedom from the Celestial Emperor, Xingyin thrives in the enchanting tranquility of her home. But her fragile peace is threatened by the discovery of a strange magic on the moon, and the unsettling changes in the Celestial Kingdom as the emperor tightens his grip on power.
While Xingyin is determined to keep clear of the rising danger, the discovery of a shocking truth spurs her into a perilous confrontation. Forced to flee her…
Books have been with me all my life as my father was a librarian and fed me books from an early age; I cannot remember being taught to read, I just could. Adventure and detective were my favourites. Then I found my local library and the horizons expanded; when I worked in a library there was the joy of being able to ‘stop’ a book I wanted to read but couldn't find. I graduated as a Biochemist and then got into computer programming. I completed my first novel in 1980 but put it away for thirty years before rewriting and publishing it. I got the writing bug and four more books followed as a series.
More magic and another enchanting new world to explore. Again I found I could dissolve into the story and be there with the characters. You are taken on adventures through this strange land where magic creeps from every stone. Start with a young girl who must face trials, partake in battles and defeat those who would enslave her people. She inherits the Kystrel a magical pendant with which she can both give and take. The first of three books which I could not put down.
In a world full of magic and mystery, eighteen-year-old Maia is the exiled princess of Comoros and rightful heir to the throne. Forced to live as a servant in her enemy's home, Maia flees her captors and begins a perilous quest to save her people. To survive, she must use magic she has learned in secret-despite the fact that women are forbidden to control it. Hunted by enemies at every turn, Maia realizes that danger lurks within her, too. Her powers threaten to steal not only her consciousness but also her sense of right and wrong. Can she set herself…
I am a retired, Scottish, NHS consultant forensic psychiatrist, who worked with mentally disordered offenders in prisons, hospitals, and in the community. I am passionate about raising awareness, destigmatisation of mental illness, and introducing the human beings behind the sensationalist newspaper headlines. They are all someone's son or daughter, who didn't ask to get ill. Occasionally mental illness makes good people do bad things. It was my job to find, treat and rehabilitate them. I believe entertaining medical memoirs can engage readers and inform thinking by challenging attitudes and assumptions.
I loved this book as it gave a vivid, no holds barred glimpse into the world of a general/vascular surgeon volunteering in a war zone.
It was written with passion and an eye for detail which captured the imagery and emotions for me, in a way that transported me right into the frontline of the war zone beside him.
This book highlights the necessity for medical services to be provided in war zones and the superhuman personal attributes of those brave staff who venture in there. I am not sure I would have been so brave.
The #1 internationally bestselling, gripping true story of a frontline trauma surgeon operating in the world s most dangerous war zones
For more than 25 years, surgeon David Nott has volunteered in some of the world s most dangerous conflict zones. From Sarajevo under siege in 1993 to clandestine hospitals in rebel-held eastern Aleppo, he has carried out lifesaving operations in the most challenging conditions, and with none of the resources of a major metropolitan hospital. He is now widely acknowledged as the most experienced trauma surgeon in the world.
War Doctor is his extraordinary story, encompassing his surgeries in…
